A Woman of Genius Part 4

The difficulty with most of our reading was that it had no relativity to the processes of life in Ohianna; we had things as far removed from it as Dante and Euripides, things no nearer than "The Scarlet Letter" and "David Copperfield," from which to draw for the exigencies of Taylorville was to cause my mother to wonder, with tears in her eyes, why in the world I couldn't be like other people. I read; I gorged, in fact, on the best books, but I found it more convenient to go on living by the shallow priggishness of Cousin Judd's selection. All that splendid stream poured in upon me and sank and lost itself in the shifty undercurrent that made still, by times, distracting eddies on the surface of adolescence.

But whatever was missed or misunderstood of its evidences, the Gift worked at the bottom, throve like a sea anemone under the shallows of girlishness, and, nourished by unsuspected means, was the source no doubt of the live resistance I opposed to all that grew out of Forester's making a vocation of being a good son. I do not know yet how to deal with sufficient tenderness and without exasperation with the disposition of widowed women, bred to dependence, to build out of their sons the shape of a man proper to be leaned upon. It is so justified in sentiment, so pretty to see in its immediate phases, that though my mother was young and attractive enough to have married again, it was difficult not to concur in her making a virtue, a glorification of living entirely in her boy. I seem to remember a time before Forrie was intrigued by the general appreciation, when it required some coercion to present him always in the character of the most dutiful son. He hadn't, for instance, invariably fancied himself setting out for prayer meeting with my mother's hymn book and umbrella, but the second summer after my father died, when he had worked on Cousin Judd's farm and brought home his wages, found him completely implicated. We were really not so poor there was any occasion for this, but mother was so delighted with the idea of a provider, and Forester was so pleased with the picture of himself in that capacity, that it was all, no doubt, very good for him.

He always did bring home his wages after that, which led to his being consulted about meals, and the new curtains for the dining-room, and to being met in the evening as though all the house had been primed for his return, and merely gone on in that expectation while he was away. Effie, I know, had no difficulty in accepting him as the excuse for any amount of household ritual, making a fuss about his birthdays and trying on her new clothes for his approval, but Effie was five years younger than Forester and I was only twenty-two months. It was more, I think, than our community in the gaucheries and hesitancies of youth that disinclined me to take seriously my brother's opinions on window curtains and to sniff at my mother's affectionate pretence of his being the head of the family. At times when I felt this going on in our house, there rose up like a wisp of fog between me and the glittering promise of the future, a kind of horror of the destiny of women; to defer and adjust, to maintain the att.i.tude of acquiescence toward opinions and capabilities that had nothing more to recommend them than merely that they were a man's! I could be abased, I should be delighted to be imposed upon, but if I paid out self-immolation I wanted something for my money, and I didn't consider I was getting it with my brother for whom I smuggled notes and copied compositions.

It never occurred to my mother, until it came to the concrete question of spending-money, that there was anything more than a kind of natural perverseness in my att.i.tude, which only served to throw into relief the satisfactoriness of her relations to her son. Forester, it appeared, was to have an allowance, and I wanted one too.

"But what," said my mother, tolerantly, for she had not yet thought of granting it, "would you do with an allowance?"

"Whatever Forester does."

"But Forester," my mother explained, waving the stocking she had stretched upon her hand, "is a boy." I expostulated.

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Olivia!" The ridiculousness of having such a question addressed to her brought a smile to my mother's lips, which hung fixed there as I saw her mind back away suddenly in fear that I was really going to insist on knowing what that had to do with it.

"I give you twenty-five cents a week for church money," she parried weakly.

"That's what you think I ought to give. I want an allowance, and then I can deny myself and give what I like."

"Forester earns his," said my mother; she hadn't of course meant the discussion to get on to a basis of reasonableness.

"Well," I threatened, "I'll earn mine."

That was really what did the business in the end. All the boys in Taylorville worked as soon as they were old enough, but it was the last resort of poverty that girls should be put to wages. Before that possibility my mother retreated into amused indulgence. She paid me my allowance, appreciably less than my brother's, on the first of the month, with the air of concurring in a joke, which I think now must have covered some vague hurt at my want of sympathy with the beautiful fiction of Forester's growing up to take my father's place with her.

They had achieved by the time Forester was twenty, what pa.s.sed for perfect confidence between them, though it was at the cost of Forester's living shallowly or not at all in the courts of boyhood which my mother was unable to reenter, and her voluntary withdrawal from varieties of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it for Forester is still on the knees of the G.o.ds.

I began to say how it was that the Gift took care of itself while Forester was engrossing the family attention. He had had a year at the business college in Montecito, which was considered quite sufficient, and rather more, in fact, than his accepted vocation as the support of his mother seemed to call for. Any question that might naturally come up of a profession for him, seemed to have been quashed beforehand by the general notion of an immediate salary as the means to that end. I do not recall a voice lifted on behalf of a life of his own. He had worked up from driving the delivery wagon in vacations to being dry goods clerk at the Cooperative, where his affability and easy familiarity with the requirements of women, made him immensely popular. Everybody liked to trade with Forester because he took such pains in matching things, and he was such a good boy to his mother. He paid the largest portion of his salary for his board, and took Effie, who adored him, about with him. I don't mean to say that he was not also good friends with Olivia, or that there was anything which prevented my doing my best with the three chocolate layer cakes and the angel's food I made for his party on his twenty-first birthday.

The real unpleasantness on that occasion came of my mother's notion of distinguishing it among all other birthdays by paying over to Forester a third of the not very considerable sum left by my father, derived chiefly from his back pay as an officer, which she had always held as particularly set aside for us children. It was owing perhaps to a form of secretiveness that in unprotected woman does duty for caution, that Effie and I had scarcely heard of this sum until it was flourished before us on the day before the birthday, much as if it had been my father's sword, supposing the occasion to have required it being girded on his son.

Forester was to have a third of that money in the form of a check under his plate on the morning of his birthday. Effie and I did full justice to the magnificence of the proposal. I was beating the whites of thirteen eggs by Pauline's recipe for angel food--mine called for only eleven--and Effie was rubbing up Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons, which had been borrowed for the party.

I was always happier in the kitchen than in any room of the house, with its plain tinted walls, the plain painted woodwork (the parlour was hideously "grained"), and the red of Effie's geraniums at the window ledge. The stir of domesticity, all this talk of my father, intrigued me for the moment into the sense of being a valued and intrinsic part of the family.

"His father would have wanted Forester to have that money," said my mother, "now that he's of age."

"And when," I questioned, raised by the mention of thirds to the joyous inclusion, "are Effie and I to have ours?"

"Oh," my mother's interest waned, "when you are married, perhaps."

It had grown in my mind as I spoke, that I had been of age now more than a year and nothing had come of it. The suggestion that my father could have taken a less active interest in the event on my behalf, pressed upon a dying sensibility; I resented his being so committed to this posthumous slight and meant to defend him from it.

"He'd have wanted me to have mine on my birthday, the same as Forester,"

I insisted.

"Oh, Olivia!" My mother's tone intimated annoyance at my claim to being supported by my father in my absurdities, but her good humour was proof against it. "Girls have theirs when they are married," she soothed.

I held up the platter and whisked the stiff froth with the air of doing these things very dexterously; I wasn't going to admit by taking it seriously, that my brother's coming of age was any more important than mine, but I spare you the flippancies by which I covered the hurt of realizing that to everybody except myself, it was.

"It is so like you, Olivia," said my mother, with tears in her eyes, "to want to spoil everything." What I had really spoiled was the free exercise of partiality by which she was enabled to distinguish Forester over her other children, according to her sense of his deserts; and, besides, what in the world would the child do with all that money?

"The same thing that Forester does," I maintained, and then quickly to forestall another objection which I saw rising in her face. "If you were old enough to be married at nineteen, I guess I am old enough to be trusted with a few hundred dollars."

But there I had struck again on the structure of tradition that kept Taylorville from direct contact with the issues of life; anybody was old enough to be married at eighteen, but money was a serious matter.

Whenever I said things like that I could see my mother waver between a shocked wonder at having produced such unnaturalness, and the fear that somebody might overhear us. And I didn't know myself what I wanted with that money, except that I craved the sense of being important that went with the possession of it. And of course now that I had been refused it on the ground of s.e.x, it was part of the general resistance that I opposed to things as they were, to have it on principle. Just when I had mother almost convinced that she ought to give it to me, she made it nearly impossible for me to accept, by asking Forester what she ought to do about it. When I had demanded it as the evidence of my taking rank with my brother as a personage, it was insufferable that it should come to me as a concession of his amiability.

What I really wanted of course was to have it put under my plate with an affectionate speech about its being the legacy of a soldier and the witness of his integrity, coupled with the hope that I would spend it in a manner to give pleasure to my dear father, who was no doubt looking on at this happy incident.

There was nothing in me then--there is nothing now--which advised me of being inappropriately the object of such an address, or my replying to it as gallantly as the junior clerk of the Cooperative. To do Forester justice, he came out squarely on the question of my being ent.i.tled to the money if he was, but he contrived backhandedly to convey his sense of my obtuseness in not deferring sentimentally to a male ascendancy that I did not intrinsically feel; and I can go back now to these disquieting episodes as the beginning of that maladjustment of my earlier years, in not having a man about toward whom I could actually experience the deference I was expected to exhibit.

Well, I had my check for the same amount and on the same occasion as my brother's, but the feeling in the air of its being merely a concession to my forwardness, prevented me from making any return for it that interfered with Forester's carrying off the situation of coming into his father's legacy on coming of age, quite to my mother's satisfaction.

What it might have made for graciousness for once in my life to have been the centre of that dramatic affectionateness, I can only guess.

Firm in the determination that since no sentiment went to its bestowal none should go to its acknowledgment, I carried my check upstairs and shook all of the rugs out of the window to account for my eyes being red at ten o'clock in the morning. And that was the way the Powers took to provide against the complete submergence of the actress in the young lady, for though it turned out that I did spend the greater part of the money on my wedding clothes, a portion of it went for the only technical training I ever had.

The real business of a young lady in Taylorville was getting married, but to avoid an obviousness in the interim, she played the piano or painted on satin or became interested in missions. If my money had fallen in eight months earlier I should undoubtedly have spent it on the third year at Montecito; as it was I decided to study elocution. It appeared a wholly fortuitous choice. I was not supposed to have any talent for it, but I burned to spend some of my money sensibly, and it was admittedly sensible for a young lady to take lessons in something.

Effie was having music, Flora Haines painted plaques; when Olivia joined Professor Winter's elocution cla.s.ses at Temperance Hall mother said it looked like throwing money away, but of course I could teach in case anything happened, which meant in case of my not being married or being left a widow with young children.

Professor Winter was the kind of man who would have collected patch boxes and painted miniatures on ladies' fans; not that he could have done anything of the sort on his income, but it would have suited the kind of man he was. He had small neat ways and nice little tricks of discrimination, and microscopic enthusiasms that hovered and fluttered, enough of them when it came to the rendering of a favourite pa.s.sage, to produce a kind of haze of appreciation like a swarm of midges. Not being able to afford patch boxes or Louis XV enamels, he collected accents instead. The man's memory for phonic variations was extraordinary; all our accustomed speech was a wild garden over which he took little flights and drops and humming poises, extracting, as it were by sips, your private history, things you would have probably told for the asking, but objected to having wrested from your betraying tongue. He would come teetering forward on his neat little boots, upon the toes of which he appeared to elevate himself by pressing the tips of his fingers very firmly together, and when you committed yourself no farther than to remark on the state of the weather or the election outlook, he would want to know if you hadn't spent some time of your youth in the South, or if it was your maternal or paternal grandfather who was Norwegian. Either of which would be true and annoying, particularly as you weren't aware of speaking other than the rest of the world, for if there was anything quite and completely abhorrent to the Taylorville mind it was the implication of being different from other Taylorvillians.

Somewhere the Professor had picked up an adequate theory and practice of voice production, though I never knew anything of his training except that he had been an instructor in a normal school and was aggrieved at his dismissal. After he had advertised himself as open for private instruction and tri-weekly cla.s.ses at Temperance Hall, there was something almost like a concerted effort at keeping him in the town, because of the credit he afforded us against Montecito. With the exception of a much-whiskered personage who came over from the business college in the winter to conduct evening cla.s.ses in penmanship, he was the only man addressed habitually as Professor, and the only one who wore evening dress at public functions.

His dress coat imparted a particular touch of elegance to occasions when he gave readings from "Evangeline" and "The Lady of the Lake"

(Taylorville choice), and thoroughly discredited a disgruntled Montecitan who, on the basis of having been to Chicago on his wedding trip, insisted that such were only worn by waiters in hotels.

It would be interesting to record that Professor Winter lent himself with alacrity to the unfolding of my Gift, but, in fact, his imagination hardly strayed so far. He taught phonics and voice production and taught them very well; probably he had no more practical acquaintance with the stage than I had. Certainly he never suggested it for me, and for my part I could hardly have explained why with so little encouragement I was so devoted to the rather tedious drill. Pauline was still at the seminary, and the regular hours of practice made a bulwark against an insidious proprietary air which Tommy Bettersworth began to wear.

Besides the voice training, I had a system of physical culture, artificial and unsound as I have since learned, but serving to restrain my too exuberant gesture, and much memorizing of poems and plays for practice work. I hardly know if the Professor had any dramatic talent or not; probably not, as he made nothing, I remember, of stopping me in the middle of a great pa.s.sion for the sake of a dropped consonant, and deprecated original readings on my part.

It was his relish for musical cadence as much as its intellectual appreciation that led him to select the Elizabethan drama, in the great scenes of which I was letter perfect by the time I had come to the end of the Professor's instruction, and at the end too, it seemed, of my devices for dodging the destiny of women.

CHAPTER VIII

I have tried to sketch to you how in Taylorville we were allowed to stumble on the grown-up consciousness of s.e.x, but I can give you no idea of the extent to which we were prevented from the grown-up judgment.

Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, one was loosed on a free and lively social intercourse from which one was expected to emerge later, triumphantly mated. This was obligatory; otherwise your family sighed and said that somehow Olivia didn't seem to know how to catch a husband, and then painstakingly refrained from the subject in your presence; or your mother, if she was particularly loyal, said she had always thought there was no call for a girl to marry if she didn't feel to want to. But anything resembling maternal interference in your behalf was looked upon as worldly minded, or at the least unnecessary. The custom of chaperonage was unheard of; girls were supposed to be trusted.

I do not recall now that I ever had any particular instruction as to how to conduct myself toward young men except that they were never on any account to take liberties. Whatever else went to the difficult business of mating you were supposed to pick up. That I did not pa.s.s through this period in entire obliviousness was due to Pauline, who had the keenest appreciation of her effect on the opposite s.e.x. She was the sort of girl who is described as having always had a great deal of attention; she had a nice Procrustean notion of the sort of young man to be engaged to--our maiden imagination hardly went farther than that--and her young ladyhood appeared to be a process of trying it on the greatest possible number of eligible Taylorvillians. When she came home from Montecito she had already met Henry Mills at the house of a roommate where she had spent the Easter vacation, and he had sent her flowers at commencement and verses of his own composition.

It was Pauline who explained to me that unless I had some young man like Tommy Bettersworth who could be counted on, I could hardly hope to be "in" things--when they made up a party to go sleighing, for instance, or a picnic to Willesden Lake. I liked being in things and did not altogether dislike Tommy Bettersworth. He was a thoroughly creditable beau and required very little handling, for even as early as that I had an inkling of what I have long since concluded, that a man who requires overmuch to be played and baited, held off and on, is rather poor game after you have got him. It worried Pauline not a little that I forgave Tommy so lightly for small offences; she was afraid it might appear that I liked him too much, when in truth it was only that I liked him too little. And for complacence, if I had had any disposition toward it, I was saved by the shocking example of Forester, all of whose relations were tinged by his vocation of model son. He had acquired by this time a manner, by the intimacy, greater than is common in boys, with which he lived into the feminine life of the household, and by his daily performance of measuring off petticoats and matching hose, which admitted him to families where we visited, on a footing that enabled him to flirt with the daughters under the very ap.r.o.n-strings of their mothers. You couldn't somehow maintain a strict virginal severity with a young man who had just taken an informed and personal interest in your mother's flannelette wrappers, the credit of whose dutifulness was a warrant for his not meaning anything in particular. In short, Forrie spooned.

I think now there was some excuse for him; he had been wrenched very early by his affections from the normal outbreaks of adolescence; he had never to my knowledge been "out with the boys." Unless he got it in the business of junior clerk at the Cooperative, he could hardly be said to have a male life at all; he was being shaped to a man's performance at the expense of his mannishness. But against his philandering rose up, not only the fastidiousness of girlhood, but some latent sense of rightness, as keen in me as the violinist's for the variation of tone; something that questioned the justice of p.r.o.nouncing thoroughly moral a young man who, if he never went over the brink, was willing to spend a considerable portion of his time on the edge of it. I should have admired Forester more at this juncture if he had been a little wild--and I knew perfectly that my mother would have interdicted any social life for me whatever if I had permitted a t.i.the of the familiarities allowed to my brother.

Among the other things which a girl was expected to "pick up," along with the art of attracting a husband, was the vital information with which she was expected to meet the occasion of marrying one. It was all a part of the general a.s.sumption of the truth as something not suitable for the young to know, that n.o.body told us any of these things if they could help it. I do not mean to say that there was not a certain amount of half information whispered about among the girls, who by the avidity for such whisperings established themselves as not quite nice. But Pauline Allingham and I were nice girls. What this meant was that nothing that pertained to the mystery of marriage reached us through all the suppression and evasions of the social conspiracy, except the obviousness of maternity. I remember how intimations of it as part of our legitimate experience, began to grow upon us with a profound and tender curiosity toward very young children, and, particularly on Pauline's part, a great shyness of being seen in their company. But we were not expected to possess ourselves of accurate information until we were already involved in it.